FLAC is a collection of both programming libraries and user programs.
As a programming library, FLAC most certainly supports writing both files
and/or various kinds of streams from any incoming audio. However, FLAC does
not contain code to read every kind of input, so support for getting the audio
from the radio requires additional code.
The FLAC user programs generally read pre-existing files, since that is
something which is available on every system. As Josh points out, they also
accept data from stdin, meaning that another program which reads audio can feed
it to the FLAC user program using a Unix "pipe." In this kind of
pipe, the
data is not keyboard input, because it contains data that could not be typed
in.
Without writing code, you'll need to find a program that can get audio data
from the radio and send it to stdout. If you can find something that does
this, then you can use bash to pipe that output into the FLAC user program.
Otherwise, you'll need to write your own program that reads audio data from
the radio and creates a FLAC file to save the encoded data. The FLAC libraries
make this *very* easy to do. But you need to find code that will read audio
data from the radio. Most developer example collections include sample code
that could read live audio data from a Soundblaster.
Good luck finding what you need!
Brian Willoughby
Sound Consulting
Begin forwarded message:
> --- Hal Vaughan <hal@thresholddigital.com> wrote:
> > I've been reading the info on Sourceforge about Flac, but
there's one
> > thing I'm not clear about (and it looks like Flac may not support
> > this yet). Before I installed it, I wanted to know if Flac would do
> > what I need.
> >
> > I want to be able to record shows on the radio (I have a radio hooked
> > up to my Soundblaster Live!). From what I've read, Flac
doesn't do
> > that, since it seems it only encodes from pre-existing files.
> >
> > Is this right, or can I use Flac to encode the incoming signal from
> > the radio and store it in a file?
>
> it can record from stdin.
I'm confused. I saw this mentioned somewhere, but I don't understand
how you
can send an audio stream through stdin -- we are talking stdin, as in what is
usually keyboard input from bash. Any suggestions on a good place to learn
more about this?